


The Persistence Of

by ExpatGirl



Series: Maybe Sprout Wings [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Episode: s09e03 I'm No Angel, Gen, Human Castiel, Miscommunication, POV Castiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 18:11:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6669013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpatGirl/pseuds/ExpatGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The dismissal is sudden and complete.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Persistence Of

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BurningTea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/gifts).



> I am sorry. But I needed to.

The dismissal is sudden and complete. Dean’s saying something, still talking, and Castiel knows he should stand at attention and listen. He’d never have tuned out an order before--probably wasn’t actually capable of it---even if he eventually chose to disobey it. It’s a frankly disgusting display of poor discipline, but there's a strange roar overriding his sense of hearing and keeping him in his seat. It’s piercing and howling all at once, the kind of noise that humans apparently hear when they’re resonating with the Word. Of course, those humans almost always exploded. But.

Right. Yes, Dean’s still talking, and something is wrong with Castiel’s hearing. He hopes he’s not going deaf; he hasn’t adjusted to having five functioning senses, losing one already might be more than he can handle.

Dean’s saying: “Okay?” with a look Castiel is having trouble reading ( _Oh, not the eyesight, too,_  he thinks). He’s supposed to say something now, which strikes him as unfair. But then what basis of comparison does he have, really.

“Okay,” Castiel says, or thinks he says, because he can’t hear.

Dean nods, and the unreadable expression changes to one that flirts with relief and...something else, but Castiel’s vision is still being unreliable. Dean’s gripping his shoulders, and Castiel  realizes that Dean’s crouching on the floor next to the chair he’s failed to vacate.

“Good,” Dean’s saying from somewhere far away. “I’m glad.”

Castiel nods, because...because he does. He makes himself stand, Dean lets go of him as he follows suit.

“So, do you? You didn’t answer me before.”

“Do I what?” The feeling seems to be going from his face. Perhaps his body has burnt itself out already? He hopes so.

“Do you…” Dean frowns. “Do you have any other way to ward against angels? One that’s reaper-proof?”

“I’ll…” _Write down every version of warding I know for you,_  he thinks, but doesn’t say. “Yeah.”

Dean’s look changes again. He nods slowly, but his eyes move away, towards the hallway where the bedrooms are. Where Sam’s sleeping.

“I’ll go say goodbye to Sam.” Dean stops him with a hand on his arm and wild, wide eyes.

“Not, uh, not a good idea. He needs sleep. I’ll...I’ll pass on your message, okay?” He smiles at the end, but it seems a beat too late.

“Oh, uh, okay.” He clears his throat. Dean never has been a fan of goodbyes, he remembers, so he carefully avoids the word. “Take care of yourself,” he says gravely. He holds out his hand, which Dean shakes after a pause. Dean nods and smiles, and neither of them look quite right thanks to Castiel’s glitching eyesight.

The numbness has spread down his neck, now. And yet his heart is incinerating. _Burning one indeed, I guess,_ he thinks.

Dean walks away then, and Cas looks back towards the bedrooms. Of course. Sam’s still recovering. Dean was vague on this point, but the way he was talking in the car suggested that the Trials had been hard on Sam, though he’s hiding it well. That’s the Winchesters for you, he supposes. But recovering people require extra resources. Extra food and water and time, and...oh.

It’s math. Dean’s done the math.

Castiel wants to say, then, that he’s willing--eager, even--to dedicate his time and energy to helping Sam recover, contribute a share of his food, or take on hunting duties that Sam’s not up for. Then he does another equation and remembers that he doesn’t really know _how_ to do any of those things yet. He’d been kind of hoping that they would teach him. But teaching, of course, also takes extra resources, and the numbers just don’t come out to anything in his favor. Dean’s practical, he deals in essentials. Time to discard the remainder.

The book refuses to balance. It would seem Castiel has some penance to do yet. Dean’s putting him back in Purgatory. _You said you didn’t deserve to be out. Guess someone heard you, after all._

He could beg. He really feels like it, which startles and angers him in a different way, yet another layer to the whole incomprehensible thing.  But then, he’s never been any good at begging for his own life, and he isn’t exactly sure how to start doing it now.

Dean’s still talking. “I’ll put our numbers in it for you, okay?”

“Numbers?”

“Yeah, me and Sam’s. You know, the permanent ones.” Dean’s frowning again, as though Castiel isn’t making sense. “You know, in case something...comes up.”

“I’ve memorized your phone numbers,” Castiel says, blankly. His voice sounds steady, which is in stark contrast to alarming way his heart pitches and shudders.

“That’s good. Smart. But better safe than sorry. Oh, and…”

Why’s Dean still talking? Why isn’t he letting Castiel leave? How many more orders are there?

One, apparently. “Okay, well, finish your burrito.”

“Alright,” Castiel says, as he sits back down and picks it up. Dean’s walking away from him, and that must complete the dismissal. Step one: finish the task. Step two: leave. Right. He’s familiar with this arrangement; it’s been his life since the moment he first drew breath in the void.

“A lot of the stuff in here’s military-issue. Not the fanciest, but sturdy, good quality,” Dean says, over his shoulder.

He has no idea why Dean’s telling him this. For some reason, this little, conversational aside about the place he’s being made to leave stabs through him hard, harder than anything else that’s happened in the last ten-- _Is it only ten?--_ minutes. He feels something akin to the righteous fury he sometimes used to feel when he’d order Uriel to stretch out his hand towards some doomed town or other. He wants to lay waste to...to something. To someone. He could level all of Kansas with what he’s feeling at the minute, and though this emotion is well known to him, it’s new to this body, and for no reason that he can discern, all the hair on his arms and legs stands on end and he feels a gulf of fire where he’s pretty sure there should only be internal organs.

He finishes the burrito in two bites. His stomach protests with an undignified noise.

Dean’s still talking, probably to him, his voice just a shade shy of a yell from down the hall. Sam must be a sound sleeper, Castiel thinks distantly. He tries to make himself listen, but the processing power in his head has been significantly downgraded, and he just can’t take any more orders at the minute. Dean’s saying something about a man named Garth, and then something that sounds like Joey or Joni, but he can’t parse the meaning behind any of these names.

He stands. His blade is a reassuring weight against his arm. There’s the change from the fifty dollar bill they gave him at the gas station they stopped at when they hit the Kansas border. He’d only spent nine dollars and seventy four cents (pork rinds, a lotto ticket, a bottle of water that somehow also tasted like strawberries, apparently--though he has yet to eat an actual strawberry for comparison), so he has forty dollars and twenty six cents to his name. Unless Dean wants it back? But no, Sam had called it walking around money, and Castiel is about to do a great deal of walking around, and...ah.

The upper half of Dean’s body appears around the corner of the hallway. His hair is slightly disheveled and he’s a little out of breath. “How do you feel about Kerouac?”

“I…have no opinion on the subject.” Castiel thinks that perhaps he’s done having opinions about anything.

“That’ll change,” Dean says, mystifyingly, and disappears again.

The conversation has now devolved into a series of riddles fit for a sphinx--they’re all extinct now, a detached part of his brain supplies. Cas takes this as his cue to go. He’s already failed to answer something, somewhere, and been eaten for it.

He carries his plate to the sink, and draws a glass of water from the tap, and then a second. Hydration's important.

He runs an inventory, the kind of check that’s programmed into him. In the old days he’d be checking for weaknesses in his armor, ensuring that he’s battle-ready, testing his weapons.

Assets: forty dollars and change, safely kept in the battered old wallet he’d inherited from Jimmy Novak. One fake FBI badge. He considers, briefly, leaving it here, but something in him makes him keep it in his pocket. (Later, he will learn that this is called _sentimentality._ ) One Kansas state lottery ticket. Blade. Half a pack of gum that Sam gave him. Several layers of clothes, including a clean pair of socks and underwear, which is important, too.

_And...that’s it._

He consoles himself with the fact that he’s gone to war with less. Granted, he’d always had hundreds of thousands of angels at his back, which reduced the vulnerability somewhat. Of course, he still has angels at his back, only this time they’re aiming at it. He laughs in spite of himself, a bitter sliver of noise.

 _At least you’ve kept your sense of humor_ , he thinks, as he turns towards the stairs.

His eyes hurt. All the fire in his belly seems to have moved northward. He tips his head forward to let the flames spill out, and is mildly surprised to find that they’re actually tears. That won’t do. There’s no need for them, and no point, just like there isn’t any need or point to the writhing knot of emotions that seem to be constricting him. He has no right, penitent that he is, to them anyway.

He takes a deep breath, straightens his back, and zips up his hooded sweatshirt with as much conviction as he can muster.

There’s something screaming in his head. He tries his best to ignore it as he climbs. Up and out, toward the hard blue plane of the early morning sky. He closes the door behind him, hears the quiet _click_ as it locks.

It would be easier, more straightforward to just walk along the road and see if anyone will give him a ride, but he has an intense desire to be away from human eyes, as though if they look at him, he’ll die. Well, he’s getting a crash course in irony today.  He’ll walk to the gas station at the Lebanon city limit. It’s roughly eleven miles, less if he cuts through woods and field. He’ll probably arrive before the middle of the day. By then, the fatigue he knows he’ll feel will probably change his mind about asking someone for a ride. If not, he’ll have to find out where the nearest bus station is and start walking. From there, he...he doesn’t know. He needs a direction, somewhere to aim himself. He has eleven miles to decide.

****

“Steve?”

Castiel doesn’t look up, struggling irritably with the packages in his hands. When he registers that the voice was directed at him, he starts and raises his head.

“Oh, sorry,” the sandy-haired woman behind the counter says. “I...thought you were someone else.” She clears her throat.

Castiel says nothing and drops the contents of his arms on to the counter.

“That’s a lot of beef jerky,” she says.  He can’t tell if her tone is approval or disgust, and he doesn’t care.

“Yeah, well, protein is important, I’m told.”

“I guess so,” she says, ringing him up. It takes a while. It really _is_ a lot of beef jerky. He adds a waxy-looking red apple from the wire shelf to the pile. He hefts two liters of water, and then, after a moment’s deliberation, says “Excuse me” and darts back to the candy aisle, picking up several different chocolate bars. Sugar. He likes sugar.

“Breakfast of champions, huh,” the woman says, when he returns.

“Something like that.” Carrying all this is going to be hell on his shoulders, he can already tell. So much of being human seems to consist of _carrying_ _stuff_ between different locations. He finds himself watching her with interest as she rings up his purchase. It’s repetitive, the pattern of it is immediately evident, easy to memorize,  the buttons neat and orderly. He finds it oddly soothing. He hands over twenty four dollars and ninety eight cents.

“Anything else, hon?”

His eye catches the display of lotto tickets. “Uh, yeah,” he says fishing his out. “I bought this yesterday. How does it...how does it work?”

She eyes him for a moment. “Not a big gambler, huh,” she says eventually.

He laughs, startled. He staked Everything--capital E--on two impossible boys, two roadhouse-owners, and an irascible old man,  and won. And lost. And lost. And lost.

“No, I’ve...just never gambled in this manner before.”

“O...kay. Well, they drew the numbers last night, so let’s see if today’s your lucky day.”

“Unlikely.”

“You never know,” she says. She punches a few more numbers, then blinks and beams up at him. “Well hey! Would ya look at that, O ye of little faith?”

Nothing she’s just said makes any sense. “What?”

“You won!”

“The...jackpot?” His mind is too saturated with color and noise to remember exactly what the amount was, but he remembers that it was...very large, by human standards.

He might faint. He’s fainted before, he knows this one.

“Oh, Lord no. Sorry, honey.” She’s still smiling. She has a bright and freshly-scrubbed face, he notices. “A hundred bucks, though! That’s better than a stick in the eye.”

“Yes that...that is preferable to being blinded,” he says. The cash register gives a little _ding_ as she opens it again.

“You look like you could use some good news,” she says gently as she hands over five twenty dollar bills. “Someone up there must like you.” She smiles at him again as she pulls out some kind of form and begins filling it out.

“If they do, they’d better keep it to themselves,” he says, staring down at the money in his hand. A thought hits him, then another and another, almost too fast for him to follow. He looks at the sign in the window, then back at her. “I need a cell phone. The cheapest one you’ve got.  And a job application form. "

“You want to become a _gas station_ _cashier_?” she asks, glancing up.

“It’s not for me,” he says, the thought forming even as he voices it. “It’s for a friend. And,” he adds, looking at her steadily. She has to know he means this. “What you do is very important. You help people. And you perform your job admirably.”

She looks down, blushing, as she hands over the application. He’s seen this before. He’s reminded of Dean, and he grits his teeth as he looks away. “I also need directions to the nearest bus station.”

“Nearest bus station’s in Kearney,” she says.

“Is that a far walk?”

“ _Walk_?” she asks, gawking at him. “It’s in Nebraska!”

“My...my car is being repaired. A friend...dropped me here.”

“Can’t your friend pick you up again?”

His throat seems to collapse in on itself. He can’t do anything but shake his head and say, more quietly than he means to: “No.”

She watches him for another minute. “Tell you what,” she says. “My brother’s heading for Hastings in a couple hours to see his kids. I’ll call him and ask him to drop you off in Kearney.”

“Oh, I…” There’s a war here.  In the last few days he’s experienced so many kindnesses, so many, like this one, but two of them have ended with a bite, and he’s not sure he wants to hold out his hand again.

“It’s no trouble,” she says quickly, misreading him. “He’ll probably just want gas money. But maybe not. I dunno. But you can’t walk to Kearney. Hey. He’s a nice guy, despite his taste in music.”

Castiel takes in a deep breath. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, thanks.”

He looks out the window and decides, then and there, to head west, away from the rising sun.


End file.
